Anatomy of methodologies for measuring consumer behavior in neuromarketing research Monica Diana Bercea (PhD Student, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iaşi, Romania) Abstract Over the last decade, research methods aimed to explain and anticipate how effective marketing campaigns are. However, most of the conventional techniques have failed. Since emotions are mediators of how consumers process messages, understanding and modeling of cognitive responses to advertisements have always been a challenge in methodology. In this context, starting the analysis from the gaps in traditional marketing research, the study reviews and discusses the advantages and limitations of using these relatively new alternative techniques such as neuroimaging or bio-signal analysis in neuromarketing research, providing a brief analysis on when they are used and what do they measure for each tool. Neuromarketing is the branch of neuroscience research that aims to better understand the consumer through his unconscious processes and has application in marketing, explaining consumer's preferences, motivations and expectations, predicting his behavior and explaining successes or failures of advertising messages. Literature results indicate that neuroimaging tools have the potential to provide valuable consumer insights and can develop marketing research. The study closes by explaining the implications of neuromarketing studies and anticipate the needs for the evolution of this field. Introduction As a result of combining neuroscience with marketing, neuromarketing arises as a relatively new research discipline. Taking advantage of advances in technology, this emerging field goes beyond traditional tools of quantitative and qualitative research, focusing on consumer's brain reactions in front of marketing stimuli. Reimann et al. (2011) formally defines consumer neuroscience as the study of the neural conditions and processes that underlie consumption, their psychological meaning, and their behavioral consequences. Technical instruments, mostly used in medicine, are used in neuromarketing studies. This paper analyzes each instrument’s advantages and drawbacks from a neuromarketing study perspective. Neuromarketing measures responses of the consumer's brain to advertising messages using neuroimaging tools such as electroencephalography (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or magnetoencephalography (MEG), so methodology has raised ethics issues concerning privacy. As Reimann et al. (2011) confirms, neuroimaging allows researchers to interpret psychological processes in the brain as they take place during information processing, unlike surveys that most often require respondents to make judgments about ex post conditions. Neuroimaging does not rely on verbal or written information from the respondent, as traditional measures commonly used in marketing research rely on the ability and willingness of the respondent to accurately report their attitudes or prior behaviors (Lee et al. 2007). Neuromarketing studies aim to analyze different brain areas while experiencing marketing stimuli in order to find and document the relationship between behavior and the neuronal system. Using knowledge and know-how from brain anatomy and knowing the physiological functions of brain areas, it is possible to model neuronal activity and investigate behavior. So neuromarketing research tries to better understand the effects of marketing stimuli on consumers, having the possibility to obtain objective data through the use of the available technology and advances in neuroscience. As Morin (2011) considers, neuromarketing research should be applied to advertising messages in order to optimize the processing of information in our brain. Ariely et al. (2010) states that the main objective of marketing is to help match products with people. Neuromarketing research aims to match activity in the neuronal system with consumer behavior, and it has a wide variety of applications for brands, products, packaging, advertising or in-store marketing, being able to determine purchase intent, level of novelty, awareness or elicited emotions. Although neuroimaging data collection implies a quantitative approach, measuring our brain activity in numbers, neuromarketing research seems to have common aspects also with the qualitative side of research. Butler (2008) proposes a neuromarketing research model that interconnects marketing researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders and states that more research needs to be performed in order to establish its academic relevance. The purpose of the current paper is to identify the gaps in traditional marketing research, review the relatively new alternative techniques such as neuroimaging or bio-signal analysis used in neuromarketing research